PayMeBack for iPhone helps you keep track of money you’ve lent

The app is delightfully set in vintage leather, with even the skeuomorphic stitches done up with great attention to detail. The animations throughout the app are smooth and to-the-point, with no grand flourishes that slow down usage. Overall, the UI is nearly perfect.

To make things better, it also comes with a great set of features. When you lend some money to someone or borrow from them, you can enter the amount into the app (which uses the currency setting that is applied globally to your phone) and assign it to a person (or five) by either manually typing in their name or choosing it from your address book. You can add a note to remind yourself of just why you lent or borrowed that money and also have the app split an amount evenly between multiple people.

It also stores your location for every transaction to help you recall the circumstances surrounding your lending or borrowing of the money. And if you enter multiple transactions related to a single person in your address book, it has the good sense to add them all up into one tidy sum, so you can just walk up to them two years later and inform them that they now owe you a grand total of $4,527.80!

Or you can send them a URL from within the app that takes them to a nicely designed webpage informing them of that fact. If they are on an iPhone and have PayMeBack installed as well, they can click on a link on that webpage to add the transaction to their own list within the app.

The only change I would suggest to that last feature, and in fact to the app overall, is to reduce the number of steps involved in sharing an item, which currently requires up to ten taps to complete. I’d also suggest winnowing down all the sharing options available to the user—which includes everything from Delicious to Facebook and Google Reader to Tumblr—to just the most essential ones.

Besides those complaints, however, PayMeBack is a great application that does what it promises to with aplomb. The App Store does have other apps that perform the same basic functions as PayMeBack—with OweMe being just one of the examples—but none do it with quite as much style, or offer nearly the same amount of features, as PayMeBack does. We suggest that you give it its due.

PayMeBack is available on the App Store for $0.99 and is compatible with all iPhones running iOS 4.2 or later. It is not a universal application.